The Court of the Air

Chapter Eighteen

What has your analyser uncovered, Aliquot?’ asked Nickleby.

‘Is it my parents?’ said Molly. ‘Have you discovered their identity?’

‘I am afraid no blood machine is sophisticated enough to do that,’ said Coppertracks. ‘Although theoretically speaking, with some modifications I am sure I might … but I digress. You may see for yourself, Molly softbody. Press your eyes up to the magnification glass.’

Molly placed her face inside the rubber hood on the front of the machine, cold glass staring down onto a pink river filled with the flow of creatures — fragile jelly-like things moving in liquid. ‘This is my blood?’

‘It is,’ said Coppertracks. ‘The gas compression acts as a powerful lens, magnifying the view of your system juices a thousand fold. What you see under the glass are the animalcules that constitute your biological cooperative.’

‘It looks — odd. Like a river filled with fish and eels.’

‘Filled with other things, young softbody. Filled with answers. Look!’ Coppertracks turned up the magnification, the machine hissing as the gas cylinders intensified their internal pressure. ‘Do you see the smaller organisms in your system juices?’

‘What can you see, lass?’ Commodore Black moved closer. ‘Through that infernal periscope of Aliquot’s?’

‘Tiny things — with cogs turning, moving through my blood, like the screws on a boat. That’s not normal, is it?’ A terrible feeling of apprehension seized Molly. Had she been poisoned, was she dying?

Coppertracks held up a wad of tape from the analysing machine. ‘Your people have a name for it, young softbody. Popham’s Disease. If you needed a transfusion of system juices during a medical operation you would die in agony unless the donor of the juices also suffered from Popham’s Disease. This is the missing link, the thing that you share with all the other victims of the Pitt Hill Slayer. This disease was not to be found on your records in Greenhall’s transaction engine rooms because the information entity that uncovered your details erased that data. I warrant that every name on the list of victims had the same disease.’

‘Why would a rare blood type make Molly a target for murder?’ said Nickleby. ‘Is there someone important who is ill with the disease — and the slayer wants to wipe out all sources of donor blood?’

‘A logical reason if the murderer could not directly make their intended victim deactivate,’ said Coppertracks. ‘But in this case I think not.’

One of the slipthinker’s mu-bodies returned to the clock chamber bearing a leather tome, its cover cracked and brown with age. Coppertracks took the book and rested it carefully on a workbench. He opened it wide and Molly saw that the pages were illuminated in metallic ink — still shining despite the crinkled age of the paper. She had never seen such beautiful illustrations before, delicately rendered raised metal images surrounded by black calligraphy in a language she did not recognize. It made the linework pictures of Jackals’ news sheets and penny dreadfuls look like bored scribbling dashed out by amateurs. Something told her that whoever had painstakingly created page after page of this work — surely a life’s labour — had not belonged to the race of man.

One of Coppertracks’ iron fingers moved over the page and Molly saw what it was he wanted her to see — a rainbow block of what she had first taken for abstract border-work around the edges of the page. The drawings were clusters of the same tiny creatures Coppertracks had pointed out swimming through the internal rivers of her body. Arrows from the script connected to the illustrations, commentary on the creatures no doubt.

‘Do you see, Molly softbody? Your council of surgeons classifies Popham’s Disease as a disorder of your system juices, but it is not. It is a gift!’

‘A gift that would let her die under a sawbones’s scalpel,’ said the commodore. ‘Blessed gifts like that you can keep to yourself.’

Molly calmed the commodore. ‘What do you mean a gift?’

‘Do you not feel an affinity for mechomancy, Molly soft-body? In the engine rooms at Greenhall you divined the purpose of the Radnedge Rotator just by looking at it. Slowcogs and Silver Onestack instinctively followed you through the caverns of the outlaw realm, Redrust the controller gave his life to protect your own after a single reading of the Gear-gi-ju cogs.’

Molly remembered her fingers flickering over Onestack’s vision crystals, restoring his sight to colour. ‘I can’t deny I feel a calling towards your people, a talent for fixing machines — but it’s a knack, I’ve always had it.’

‘You have always had it because you have one foot in the world of fastbloods and one foot in the race of steammen, young softbody. Those creatures in your blood are of my people. They are machine life. They are of the metal.’

Molly felt faint — the odd disparity she had always felt in her life, the little differences between her and the other poorhouse children — rushed towards her in a swell of clarity. ‘How did they get there, Aliquot Coppertracks?’

‘For that,’ said the steamman, ‘you have to go back to lost books like this, lost history. This tome is from the age following the fall of Chimeca, the first age of freedom following the thawing of the world. Before that, all the kingdoms of the continent — including the lands that would become Jackals — were held under the sway of the Chimecan Empire. They ruled the ruins of the world from their underground holds. You must have seen the ruins of their works in your travels in the world below?’

‘Their ziggurats and crystals are still down there,’ said Molly. ‘In some of the caverns.’

‘Their empire’s reputation has been diluted by the passage of the millennia,’ said Coppertracks. ‘But my people still remember something of the ferocity of their rule. They drew power through human sacrifice, blended it with the earthflow streams that are now only tamed by the order of worldsingers. The ruined kingdoms of the surface were little more than slave farms to provide souls for their terrible rites. During the worst years of the long age of cold they ate the meat of their brothers in the Circle, the race of man, graspers, craynarbians, all were food for their table. Half-covered in ice, the broken nations of the over-grounders were helpless to resist the Chimecan legions. Many of the tunnels of the atmospheric are a legacy of their reign; part of an underground transport system that could deploy armies of dark-hearted killers to any part of the continent within days, crushing rebellions and seizing families — sometimes the populations of entire cities — for punishment sacrifices.’

‘Then these things in Molly’s blood are from their empire?’ said Nickleby.

‘Quite the opposite, dear mammal,’ said Coppertracks. ‘When the lands of the surface began to warm, when the cycle of the world turned again to an age of warmth and the ice sheets retreated north, the nations of the over-grounders grew confident again. They began to plot the overthrow of their Chimecan masters. This book tells of a slave of the empire called Vindex, a philosopher and teacher from what are now the city-states of the Catosian League. He discovered a terrible secret. The Chimecans and their dark insect gods of the Wildcaotyl were only too aware of what the rising temperatures on the surface would do to their iron rule and their supply of meat and souls. They were planning something terrible that would solidify their rule — but in the event, their horrific design failed. Vindex escaped and drew to him a band of heroes to oppose the Chimecans’ plan of last resort. Under the retreating ice sheets Vindex discovered something, a hatch leading down to an ancient underground station filled with sorcery and machines. Machines which were to change his body, bring him into the realm of metal.’

‘He had these things in his blood too?’

‘According to this tome and the prayer songs which we still sing for our ancestors, his system juices would have been teeming with the life metal. After he had changed his body, he created seven holy engines to bind the gods of Chimeca to darkness, the seven Hexmachina, and led them in war against the Chimecans and their Wildcaotyl gods.’

Something of what Coppertracks was telling her seemed to resonate with Molly — the horrible dreams she had experienced in the abandoned temple in the caverns below, the feeling of deja vu.

‘Come now, old steamer,’ said the commodore. ‘Tell me this talk of dark gods and wicked empires is for scholars and archaeologists — what does it have to do with our Molly Templar?’

‘Do you not understand? Molly softbody is a descendant of Vindex, which is why her system juices bubble with the very stuff of mechomancy. All those who have died at the hands of the Pitt Hill Slayer are his descendants.’

‘But it is only individuals who have been targeted — not families or children,’ said Nickleby. ‘If you wanted to wipe out such an ancient bloodline you would have to murder thousands of Jackelians today.’

‘Popham’s Disease is not inherited uniformly,’ said Copper tracks. ‘Its mechanism is not understood and has baffled your surgeons since its discovery. That is because they look at it as a disease, when it is not. They know that it only manifests itself shortly before or shortly after adolescence, but understand nothing about the random nature of its inheritance.’

‘Then this stuff in my blood is there by chance,’ said Molly. ‘I could have been born the same as everyone else.’

‘It is within you not by chance, but by design, Molly soft-body. Your gift allows you to communicate with the Hexmachina — to wield the holy engines like a duellist balancing a sword. Not everyone born to the bloodline of Vindex is a natural operator. The gift will only manifest in those with the talent to control the Hexmachina. In those who lack the talent the gift will stay latent, like a chameleon, mimicking the natural animalcules of your system juices so well as to be indistinguishable even under the scrutiny of advanced organic analysers such as this.’

‘That is the why of it, then,’ said the commodore. ‘Poor Molly, with the unlucky blood of some ancient sage flowing through her veins.’

‘But not the whom of it,’ said Nickleby. ‘Who is it that wants the operators of the Hexmachina dead?’

‘The answers to that are not to be found inside this tome,’ said the steamman. ‘But we already have enough information to conjecture on their motives. Potential operators of the Hexmachina are being eliminated — so the most likely conclusion to be drawn is that someone does not wish the Hexmachina to be operated.’

‘Those ancient engines still exist?’ asked Molly.

‘If our people had the answer to that, the spirit of Steelbhalah-Waldo would sleep easier in the hall of the ancients. Three of the Hexmachina were almost certainly destroyed in the war to overthrow the Chimeca. Two of the remaining four have been lost to us since that time — I have collected as many tales, rumours and legends of what happened to them as there are hours in the day to listen to them. In all probability they have been washed away by the tide of history and the events of the ages.’

‘And then there were two,’ said Nickleby.

Coppertracks passed the precious tome to one of his mu-bodies, the little drone disappearing with it back to Tock House’s library. ‘Yes, indeed. One is said to be in Liongeli, broken and near useless, a curio of a hideous race that I must regrettably admit was once distantly related to the steammen. Of them I shall not speak. The other Hexmachina is said to keep to the caverns of the undercity. Scuttling about hidden tunnels and collapsed cities so deep even the grave robbers of Grimhope will not venture there. A solitary ghost haunting the scene of its greatest moment — banishing the gods of the Wildcaotyl to the darkness beyond the walls of the world.’

‘What good will it do them to kill me?’ said Molly. ‘From what you say there will be others who will follow me. Jackals could be filled with children who will develop this disease, this gift when they grow older.’

‘A most fascinating question, Molly softbody. The last operator — at least for a day, a month, or a year — until other descendants of Vindex with your gift pass through adolescence. And possibly the last Hexmachina too. What mischief can be made in the conjunction of those two facts, I wonder?’

‘Nothing good,’ said Commodore Black. ‘Of that I am mortal sure. With the amount of money they’ve put on the poor lass’s head I am surprised we haven’t had half the flash mob in the city knocking at our gates.’

‘In this matter, anonymity is our friend,’ said Nickleby.

Coppertracks’ skull erupted into light, fiercer than Molly had ever seen before. ‘Dear mammal, I fear anonymity may have betrayed us. I have just lost contact with all my mu-bodies beyond the woods.’

‘An accident?’

‘Simultaneously?’ The steamman’s mu-bodies in the clock room exploded into action, scattering to a dozen synchronised tasks.

‘Aliquot Coppertracks, say this is not so,’ whined the commodore.

‘I fear it is. There are intruders in the grounds. In numbers large enough to destroy a dozen of my mu-bodies in chorus.’

A ball of fear curled inside Molly’s stomach. She had found out why her implacable foes were hunting for her. Not for a family inheritance that did not even exist, but for her very blood itself. But now it was too late. Her friends were in danger again … and it was all because of her. The hidden enemy were going to do to Tock House what they had done to her family at the Sun Gate poorhouse. She was going to end up on a butcher’s table while some history-obsessed maniacs opened up her veins and she became just another name on the Pitt Hill Slayer’s tally of victims.

‘My beautiful house,’ moaned Nickleby. ‘I knew this was too good to last.’

Commodore Black raided a storeroom on the side of the clock house chamber and then stumbled out with both arms spilling over with rifles and black leather bandoleers of crystal shells. He saw the look on Molly’s face. ‘They’re from the Sprite of the Lake. I never did have the heart to chuck out the blessed things.’

‘Circle, commodore, were you piloting a submarine or a man-o’-war?’

‘Well now lass, you can be sailing across some rough old coves out there on the oceans.’

Coppertracks’ mu-bodies grabbed the weapons out of his arms and dispersed smoothly to positions around Tock House. Black tossed the sling of a eight-barrel monstrosity around his shoulder. Molly had heard the whippers at the Angel’s Crust laughing about those things — they had never said anything good about them.

‘Commodore, that’s a suicide gun!’

‘No lass; a suicide gun fires one barrel at a time. This wicked devil empties all eight at once. She’s a lucky gun! Mounted on the conning tower of the Sprite she was, and many a time I used her beautiful mouth to sweep the decks of a boarding party while we sat recharging the Sprite’s air supply.’

Molly jumped as a booming noise echoed up the staircase. Nickleby lay a steadying hand on her shoulder. ‘Tock House was built just after the civil war, Molly. Soldiers from both armies laid off and dangerously unemployed on the streets. Why do you think there are no windows on the first two storeys? That was the house’s transaction engine triggering the clockwork on the shield above the door.’

‘Shield?’

‘Twelve inches of layered armour,’ said Nickleby. ‘The Jackelian Artillery Company would pause before taking our front door down.’

Something pinged off the walls of the tower.

‘That was too quiet,’ said Nickleby.

Commodore Black risked a quick glance out of the window. ‘Toppers, then. Ah, I can see the mufflers on their mortal guns. Real hard men, coming to kill a scared little lass. Come on you dark-hearted jiggers, let’s see how you like what old Blacky has got for you!’

A cadre of Middlesteel’s professional assassins. Not one, but an army of them. They were all as good as dead. Molly slumped to the floor and pushed her red hair back out of her face. She had brought this on her friends. Better they had caught her on the streets of Sun Gate outside the poorhouse and none of this had happened.

Nickleby lit his mumbleweed pipe and the sweet smell filled the room. He picked a rifle from the commodore’s pile and offered it to Molly like he was proffering a plate of cheese at the dinner table.

‘I’ve never used a gun before,’ said Molly.

‘Lass,’ Commodore Black called from his position at the window. ‘In ten minutes’ time, you are going to have a whole blessed world of experience.’

Oliver noticed that fewer people were passing through the main square of Rattle. The day was wearing on and there was still no sign of the man they were waiting for. Rattle was the last hamlet before Shadowclock, a farmers’ market where the drovers could trade their poultry and swine without having to pay the toll on the city road. Their gypsy travelling companions had avoided the main crown highway too, heading south over the hills of the downlands that morning. Paying a levy to the local board of roads held as much attraction to the nomads as swapping their bright wooden caravans for one of Rattle’s thatched cottages.

The copper hands of the square’s clock reflected the last ember of the sunset from their burnished metal.

‘Is your contact likely to answer his summons?’ asked Steamswipe.

Harry nodded. ‘If he knows what’s good for him he will.’

‘Can you be sure he’ll get the message?’ said Oliver.

‘I still have a little faith in human nature, old stick,’ said Harry. ‘And a little more in the purchasing power of the Jackelian shilling I gave that trader for taking him the word.’

Lights were beginning to appear in the windows of Rattle, the smell of slipsharp oil rising from the tavern behind them as the coaching inn’s staff lit their own lanterns. Finally a wagon hove into view, creaking at a stately pace, and Harry rose to greet it. Behind the reins sat just about the oldest man Oliver had ever seen — his face fissured with age, part covered by a white beard trimmed into a fork. He was wearing a grey dog collar with the infinity symbol and fish of the Circlist faith on his waistcoat. The man nodded at the disreputable Stave.

‘Harold.’

‘Reverend,’ said Harry.

The preacher cast a languid glance at Oliver and the knight steamman. ‘I thought you worked alone.’

‘The lad is almost family, reverend. And my friend of the metal … well, you could say he is something of a favour.’

The preacher grunted and looked at Steamswipe. ‘Those saddlebags would be his idea.’

‘You would be correct,’ said the steamman.

‘Saw a fox wearing a hat once,’ said the reverend. ‘It was still a fox. You can ride alongside us, my dangerous friend. Unless you fancy taking a turn pulling my wagon. Harold, boy, in the back.’

With the nag pulling the cart — nearly as toothless as the churchman — they made a slow arc around the village square, then began trotting down the hamlet’s lanes.

‘You think I would come, Harold?’

‘When you got my message,’ said the wolftaker.

‘Damn presumptuous of you. But then you always were a chancer.’

‘I think I’m on safe enough ground,’ said Harry. ‘Hallowed ground in fact. We need to get into Shadowclock and I don’t have city permission papers this time. We also need a place to hide while I conduct a little business.’

‘Has the Court lost its taste for forgery, Harold, or are you running something off the ledger?’

Harry scratched his nose. ‘You just worry about blagging us past the gate constables, reverend. Leave keeping the ledger straight to me.’

To Oliver’s surprise the Circlist churchman turned the cart away from the main road and into a wood. When they emerged from the press of pine, the high walls of Shadowclock rose before them, a pall of engine smoke hanging over the city. Contained by ramparts sixty feet high the town sat crowded across three hills, tall buildings of Pentshire granite and steep, narrow streets stained with soot. Even though it was late evening Oliver could still hear the muffled thumps and whistles of machinery from the gas mines.

They rolled down the slope towards the city, Steamswipe’s red visor gleaming as he scanned the substantial walls for sentries. Counting the towers visible on the highest of the hills, the knight noted every bloated warship docked inside the city, aerostats drifting in and out of view as clouds of smoke from the mines wafted in the still summer air.

Towards the bottom of the slope the reverend’s cart rolled past the gates of a graveyard and into a field of head stones, well tended but stained black by their proximity to the city. Two bare-chested graspers with rippling muscles stopped digging a fresh hole to wave at the churchman, then recommenced their labours.

‘I wasn’t too sure if we were going to find you filling one of your own plots,’ said Harry.

‘The Circle still has a little work left for me to do here,’ said the reverend, ‘before the wheel turns for me.’

Tying the cart up in the shadow of a temple the reverend unlocked a door and led them into a cool chamber, the centre of the room filled with a stone sarcophagus, a couple carved out of stone lying serenely in the shadows. Reaching down to the platform of the sarcophagus, the reverend grasped the infinity symbol carved into the marble and twisted it, then stepped aside as the sarcophagus crunched back on rollers.

He waved them down the hole that had been uncovered, yellow lamplight flickering below. They climbed down a ladder and Oliver found himself face to face with more graspers, whiskers twitching as they unpacked the contents of a coffin into the underground passage. Not a cadaver, but bottles of jinn, unlabelled and full of the pink liquid.

Harry scooped one of the bottles up and cracked it open against the wall, emptying it down his throat in one easy movement. ‘And here’s me thinking the governor was running a dry city.’

The reverend took the bottle off Harry. ‘He will be again if you keep consuming the victuals.’

Following the slope of the tunnel for a couple of minutes, their passage widened into a series of cave-like catacombs and Steamswipe unhunched his back, the low hiss of his boiler the only sound in the cavern. Spared the soot of the engines above ground, the cave walls gleamed white as the churchman’s torch passed them.

Harry tapped a pile of barrels as they navigated through the cave tunnels. ‘All this money — one day I’ll visit and you’ll have disappeared. Where’s the reverend, I’ll ask? Oh, they’ll say, he’s retired to the colonies. Left a legacy by a nephew. Bought a plantation he did.’

The reverend snorted. ‘You know where the money goes, Harold. If you didn’t, you’d still be waiting back in Rattle. Not all our coffins are full of contraband. By the Circle, I wish they were.’

The reverend led them through the cold twisting tunnels of the catacombs, passing as many chambers filled with moon-raker’s produce as littered with bones — a smuggler’s fortune hidden beneath the surface of Shadowclock. The reverend seemed to have moved from preaching against sin to controlling it inside the city. His Circlist position was the perfect cover. Oliver wondered if the vicar back in Hundred Locks had been helping the moonrakers land illegal cargoes in the bay of the dike too. Perhaps the whole Circlist church in Jackals was a front for the flash mob, the crime barons of Middlesteel all surreptitiously sitting as bishops and prelates.

Surfacing in the basement level of a church, Oliver stepped out of a hidden door in the wall, into a room piled with old pews and a crowd of broken oak-carved gargoyles.

‘You can stay in the hospice rooms at the back,’ said the preacher to Harry. ‘They’re not fancy, but I figure for a queer-looking party like yours, it’s better than the questions you would get trying to room at an inn or boarding house.’

The reverend went to leave but Harry stopped him. ‘There’s someone we need to meet, reverend.’ He unfolded a scrap of paper and showed the churchman the scar markings Oliver had drawn back on Harry’s narrowboat. ‘He’ll have a high position in the grasper warren and mining combination. A few years on him.’

The reverend took a seat on an old stone chair from the high Circlist days, thinking. He looked like a monarch from the ancient age of Jackals, a fissured old prophet sitting in judgement. ‘You’ve come a long way for nothing, Harold. I know the man with these warren scars. He’s dead. I buried him myself.’

‘Dead how, old man?’

‘Officially it was a cave-in. Unofficially, well, I’ve seen my share of rock wounds and what was left of him to bury didn’t have them. I would say someone dropped your miner down a very long mineshaft. I didn’t hold an open-coffin wake if you know what I mean.’

‘He was a combination man,’ said Harry. ‘High warren! Back when I was last here there would have a been a withdrawal of labour until the crushers found a killer.’

‘Yes there would,’ said the reverend. ‘Five years ago. But things have changed in Shadowclock. There have been an awful lot of cave-ins and gas flares under the three hills — accidents that always seem to kill key members of the brotherhood of gas miners.’

‘The combination’s done nothing? You’ve done nothing?’

‘I’m a tired old man, Harold. On a good day I can just about climb into my cart myself and ride the parish. And the combination’s been broken as long as I have.’

‘The governor couldn’t break an egg in the morning without his valet. What in the Circle’s name has happened here while I’ve been gone?’

‘The combination was broken from the inside out, Harold. Not from the hill, although I’m sure the governor is in on all the merry japes that are being played here. Either that or he is so scared he’s looking the other way. The man you were looking for has a son. I’ll ask him to come over tomorrow. You can ask him your questions.’

‘What does Anna think of all this?’ asked Harry.

‘She moved along the Circle a couple of years ago,’ said the reverend. ‘Old age. I buried her out back myself. Elizabeth and the girls left soon after. They got tired of wiping dust from the mines off their dresses, got tired of the engine smoke, maybe they even got tired seeing how little difference I was making here.’

The reverend left to check on the rooms at the back of the church. Harry looked pale and wan. He had been expecting to meet someone different. The old man had changed, deflated.

‘The softbody priest,’ said Steamswipe. ‘You are threatening him with exposure of his smuggling activities?’

‘Don’t sound so disapproving,’ said Harry. ‘Sneaking stuff past city customs is the least of it. He was a wicked old fox in his day. Gave the wolftakers the run-around like nobody else in the Court’s history.’

‘How did a town vicar ever come to warrant the Court’s attention,’ said Oliver.

‘It wasn’t the churchman that caught our eye,’ said Harry. ‘It was someone else entirely. But I reckon that man’s dead now. Come on, let’s get our packs stowed.’

The reverend’s church was built into the narrow terraced streets. Oliver sat on a window seat, carefully cleaning the boatman’s gun the way Harry had showed him, with half an eye on the waking city outside. Three storeys below gas miners were changing shift, crowds of graspers wearing dirty gutta-percha capes and gas hoods trudging back home, elephantine breather filters swinging from their faces in a solemn pendulum sway. Normally the graspers would have been quite capable of mining without protection — their own warren cities in the downlands were testament to that. But exposure to celgas caused burns to even their tough hide, so they rode the steam lifts underground in their stifling suits and sweated their labours for Jackals’ most precious commodity.

Somewhere out there, obscured by the engine smoke and rock dust of Shadowclock, were the answers. The answers to why his family lay dead in Hundred Locks. The answers to why his name now adorned wanted posters on constables’ walls for murders he had not committed. The answers to why momentous events now seemed to swing around the orbit of his small life like drunken dancers around a festival pole.

‘You don’t look like you’re used to doing that, boy.’ It was the reverend. For all his years he moved with the silence of a cat. There was something else Oliver found disconcerting. The way the old man’s shadow moved sometimes — faster than his age, larger than his bulk. Like it belonged to someone else. ‘In fact, you don’t look any more comfortable than when you’re wiping the gunk off that talking obscenity your steamman friend keeps rolled away.’

Oliver placed a gleaming barrel down on the cloth. ‘I’ve only shot it the once — and if I hit what I was aiming at it was an accident.’

‘That I figured. How old are you, son? You look like you should just be finishing off your schooling, not trailing behind a poacher-turned-gamekeeper like Harold Stave.’

Oliver scratched a pattern in the soot on the window. ‘I was tossed out of school when they put me on the county registration book.’

‘Ah,’ said the reverend. ‘A bit of wild blood running through the veins, eh? That’s too bad. We don’t get the mist much in this part of the world. Don’t mix well with the earthflow streams and the gas we’re sitting on, I reckon. You’ll die of black lung and tunnel rot before you choke on a feymist here at Shadowclock.’

‘Is that why you stay here?’ said Oliver.

‘I go where I’m needed, pilgrim,’ said the reverend. ‘I’m a lifetime too old to fear the mist now, boy. Too old to survive the changes if it got me. Besides, a man has to die of something.’

‘You’re needed to supply jinn to the miners?’

‘That’s the mercenary streak you get hanging around Harold Stave speaking, boy,’ said the reverend. ‘There’s more than one sort of crime. As a for instance, Shadowclock doesn’t have a board of the poor to help the families here when they fall on hard times. The city’s a mining town — if you’re not working the governor doesn’t want you taking up valuable space that could be filled by someone more able. This is a bad place to get lame, injured or sick in.’

‘You sound like a Carlist,’ said Oliver.

‘That’s been noted before,’ said the reverend. ‘But when you come down to it, there’s not much that was written in Community and the Commons that wasn’t spoken first by one prophet or another in the good book. People are all people have got, boy. We need to look out for each other.’

The truth of what the reverend was doing suddenly settled on Oliver. ‘That’s why you’re running this place like the flash mob! You use the money to help the families that would have gone to the poor board.’

‘Keep your voice down, son. The state wouldn’t care for it if they knew I had a parallel system of taxation running underneath their noses.’

‘And Harry found out about it.’

‘That’s a polite way of asking is that what he’s got over me,’ said the reverend. ‘If it was, it would be the best of it. His people might care about the security of this place, but they don’t give a damn about skimming the froth off the customs gate. Their attitude to it is the same as mine — people have been drinking and stuffing their pipes for as long as there’s been history — someone’s going to do it. My way there’s fewer hungry children keeping their parents awake at night crying because the stew pot was more water than it was gravy.’

‘You sound tired,’ said Oliver.

‘By damn I am tired, pilgrim. Life at my age is like serving in a war. Everything you ever loved, everyone you knew, has been cut down by the years. I’ve outlived them all; my wife, my friends, most of my damn enemies too. All I have left is my anger at the foolishness of the world. The unnecessary cruelties, the pomposity and vanity of people who should know better. Most of the time I just want to shake some sense into the world.’

Oliver did not know what to say. Listening to the old man was like hearing the thunder roll at the end of a storm. Their places in the world separated by the gulf of a lifetime. Something about the reverend made him uneasy, but he wasn’t sure if it was a hidden darkness in the man or a premonition that he might be seeing echoes of how he would end up seventy years hence.

From down the stairs Oliver heard Steamswipe calling his name. ‘I’d better go.’

‘Better had, boy.’

When Oliver had gone the reverend checked the stairs then shut the door to the room. He went to the window seat where Oliver had been resting and lifted up the cover. From underneath a jumble of blankets the reverend pulled out a wooden box. Settling his bones into a chair he balanced the box on his legs and toyed with the clasp. What had made him think of it now? He hadn’t thought of the box for months, let alone looked at it. Too much talk of the past. No fool like an old fool. Against his better nature he lifted the lid and the light of the box’s contents illuminated the crevices of his face. He sighed and put the box away. Then, resting back in the chair, he fell asleep.

It was a light slumber, the slumber of age and weariness. As a child the reverend had laughed when his own grandfather had fallen asleep during the day. It had seemed comical. Now he did the same four or five times a day. His dreams had become pedestrian since Anna had moved along the Circle: he was busying about the church, checking the cushions were still underneath the pews. Then the thing walked in from the street. Surely nothing could have been so badly injured in a tunnel gas flare and lived? It was a gargoyle given flesh.

‘By damn,’ said the reverend.

‘Not quite,’ said the Whisperer. ‘Although one of us might be damned.’

‘What in the name of the Circle are you, my friend?’

‘You can think of me as your conscience,’ hissed the Whisperer.

‘My conscience sure got mean since I last used it.’

‘No false modesty now,’ said the Whisperer, ‘your conscience gets out more than I do. All those secret payments to the widows and the children, the food for the miners with limbs as mangled as mine.’

The dream seemed more vivid than usual. The reverend looked around the church with unnatural clarity. ‘My conscience seems very well informed today, sir.’

‘I like your mind, old man. It’s as still as that graveyard you tend, and has as many secret tunnels buried away beneath it.’

‘We all have secrets,’ said the reverend, ‘and a tale to tell. Behind that flesh of yours, for instance.’

‘Ah, but my story is a mere abbreviation in comparison to yours, old man,’ said the Whisperer. ‘What’s to tell? A feymist rising and a sleeping child in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘The lives of half the Special Guard began that way.’

‘You should take a tour of Hawklam Asylum some time, old man. Poke a stick between the bars of the low-risk feybreed with all the other curious ladies and gentleman of Middlesteel. You would see how most of our stories end up.’

‘So you are connected to the boy.’

‘So I am,’ said the Whisperer. ‘I’ve been having a little trouble getting into Oliver’s dreams of late. His body’s defences seem to be reacting to me as a threat after I had to pour a little unpleasant fey medicine down his throat.’

‘Lucky him.’

‘Don’t be like that, old man. I’m only trying to steer him in the right direction.’

‘Yes, but right for who?’ said the reverend.

‘That sounds a little sanctimonious coming from you, preacher,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘You used to redraw the line between right and wrong all the time. Or maybe you’ve forgotten? The Circlelaw by day, the mask and the black horse by night. Who was ever going to suspect you?’

‘The money went to those who needed it,’ said the reverend.

‘I believe you will find the counting houses and merchants you relieved of all that gold thought they needed it,’ said the Whisperer.

‘They were wrong.’

‘Don’t think I disapprove,’ said the Whisperer. ‘Quite the opposite in fact. You remember when you were given the box, when you found him half-dead in your old vicar’s church? Now it’s time to pass the box on.’

‘You’re talking about the boy.’

The Whisperer’s limbs twitched, but his silence spoke for him.

‘Don’t you think he’s been cursed enough? Given wild blood, chased away from his home in the company of those two killers.’

‘It’s time to pass the box on, old man. It’s time for him to ride again.’

‘I won’t do it to the boy,’ said the reverend. ‘I’ve spent the last two decades trying to forget what I was.’

‘But you can’t, can you, old man? You’re like a worldsinger trying to meditate away the urge for another sniff of petal dust. The box calls to you, doesn’t it? It sings to be opened, to make you feel alive again — to make the night your cloak and make the wicked suffer under your heel.’

‘I will not let him out again,’ said the reverend. ‘I will not bear the responsibility for it.’

‘The responsibility was never yours to give,’ said the Whisperer.

‘Even if I could, Harold Stave will not let me.’

‘Now that’s the weasel in you talking,’ said the misshapen feybreed. ‘Stave knows about you, but he never knew about the box. As far as the Court is concerned the Hood-o’the-marsh died a long time ago. Give Oliver the box. If it’s time for him to ride, he will.’

‘That’s an awful thing to wish on a man.’

‘He may not live without it,’ said the Whisperer. ‘You may choose to hide yourself away in the smog of the mines but you have noticed all the odd little things going on in the city, haven’t you? The disappearances. The beatings. Out with the old, in with the new.’

‘I’m old,’ said the reverend, ‘but I am not blind yet.’

‘Well you don’t know the jigging half of it. There’s a storm coming and that line from the Circlelaw about where there is pain, ease it, that isn’t going to count for a whole lot soon, old fellow. Two ounces of mumbleweed without gate tax isn’t going to pay for a pauper’s funeral this time. All those hungry eyes of the children you had to bury — the ones that used to visit your nightmares — you better start laying in a fresh stack of small coffins.’

‘Get out of my head,’ cried the reverend.

‘Give him the box.’

‘He’s feybreed already,’ said the reverend. ‘Hasn’t he got witch powers?’

‘They seem a little shy right now,’ said the Whisperer, ‘and a bit too defensive for my tastes. And as you pointed out, Oliver is just a man. He’s been uprooted from everything that’s familiar, had what passes for a family cut out from underneath him. He is being hunted to ground like a fox by the order and the crushers for a crime he didn’t even commit. If a lifetime of hamblin contempt hadn’t made him so antisocial and contained to start with, this would have broken him. You can feel the anger within Oliver, old man. A sea of it. It needs a release. I need him released from the box and so does Jackals.’

The reverend crumpled back in his chair, feeling every one of his years. ‘I always thought I would die as the Hood-o’themarsh.’

‘You should have burnt the box,’ said the Whisperer.

‘You don’t think I didn’t try! I flung it into the furnaces up on the hill. The next morning I found it stored back in my chest under the blankets, waiting for me like a damn dog to be fed. That’s what you’re asking me to pass on.’

‘It’ll feed now,’ hissed the Whisperer. ‘It’s time for a banquet.’